


The Dreaming Dead

by vinnie2757



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dream Bubble, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-20
Updated: 2011-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-26 08:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/280730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of everything, Jade does everything she can to ease their passage into nothing, leaving John to lie upon the checkboard with time to kill and a lifetime to live in a second.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dreaming Dead

Something hurts. In your chest. It feels like heartbreak.

This assumes, of course, that you know what heartbreak feels like.

Sometimes, it’s hard to tell what you feel. But you know, you can feel this for sure. Something in your chest Hurts. It hurts like a bitch and it’s not stopping any time soon. It’s lingering, holding you in place, like it _knows_ , like it’s better than you, and what the hell is wrong with your life that your own feelings can destroy you?

Your name is John Egbert, and you’ve just watched Karkat Vantas die.

His body lies broken on the checkerboard, fingers still curled about his sickles, eyes open and lips stained red.

You’ve only known him for a few hours, maybe eight at a push. You spent four of them asleep, tucked under a desk in the lab, holding Liv Tyler tight and pretending that this was, obviously, all a bad dream. You don’t think Liv minds, she’s been with you since the very beginning, kind of, in a time-loop-y sort of way, an amalgamation of all of you and your friends. Dave sent it to you originally, and then you gave it to Rose as a child, who mended it with knitting and returned it to you, only for you to give it to _Jade_ as a child, who, with help of her penpal, turned the bunny into what it is now.

You like to think you’d planned it.

You don’t tell Rose about this thought – about the dreaming, because her eyes are still white, though her skin’s whiter still. Dave and Rose and Jade, they know what it’s like now, being God Tier (Dog Tier in Jade’s case? It’s no time for jokes, but you feel obliged, hysteria bubbling alongside that Hurt) and being able to fly and Do the Thing, and _never ever die_.

You can’t breathe, every breath catching in your throat, stuck on the Hurt and your heart – your blood gushing vascular pump, whatever they called it, the trolls and their weird and wonderful names – it pounds, thumping in your wrists, in your neck. You’d seen Karkat look at the pulse jumping in your neck, nose wrinkled a little, like he was trying to work out what it was. You’d stared back, and his heart had been perfectly still, not even a twitch under his jaw. You learn, later, from Dave, that troll skin is too thick to see something as tiny as a heartbeat.

Your heart stutters on the lack of oxygen and you gasp, struggling to find space in your throat to take air in. It tastes of smoke, smells of blood, looks like ash, clinging to your tongue and lodging in your windpipe. You choke, cough and splutter and feel warm hands on your arms – too warm, even, boiling, burning as they touch you, and you hate it, you hate how someone can be so hot when you’re so cold, when _he’s_ so cold, trying to haul you up and out, but you shake free, barely moving, and the warmth goes, takes the ticking of a clock with it, and you feel empty.

You’ve never felt so alone in your life.

You think desperately, _I’m not a homosexual_. But it’s no good.

You weren’t gay, trolls didn’t have defining gender traits the way humans did. Male trolls and female trolls made a choice at six sweeps, when the Drones first came, so Kanaya explained upon their first meeting, it falling to her to educate the pitiful little humans in what should have been basic knowledge, to define their gender. It was a process that began much earlier than that, she said, with the first thoughts of he and she in their heads from the moment their lusii picked them up and took them to their hives, but it didn’t take shape until six sweeps – roughly, she said, when puberty began for humans, or so she’d come to understand.

You think she might have smelt hormones or blood or hair or something, because trolls were weird like that. You think that maybe Karkat had been able to tell you were only days from puberty, your voice pitching awkwardly in excitement, cracking on hard consonants in anger.

Karkat liked to say he hated you, that he despised your very existence, but you know better. Kanaya and Terezi, and Sollux, they’d get this look on their faces, even though the first couldn’t express emotion straight any more, and the latter two were blind, like they were proud, almost. Happy for him. Even a little resentful. Even a little disbelief in Terezi’s grin, the one she flashed at you as the lab exploded around you and you were all fleeing, your hand tight about Karkat’s wrist as you hauled him up into the air and got you both to safety. Dave took Terezi, Rose Kanaya and Jade Sollux. Once out of the immediate blast zone, Jade transportalised you all to safety using her Thing, and you were safe enough to breathe.

Safe enough to die.

Everybody’s dead.

It’s only a matter of time.

Terezi’s screaming in the distance, hurling trollish obscenities, and once upon a time, you might have listened to them with amusement, tried to copy them, in the name of cultural sensitivity. But not now.

Now there’s blood on your hands – his blood – _Karkat’s_ blood – and you want more.

You want English’s blood.

Oh, Bec Noir had been taken care of. It had been easy, with four God Tiers – with _Jade_. You remember dying. You remember how much it hurt.

Before you understand how you managed to make yourself move, you’ve crossed the board, the Windy Thing going everywhere, tearing the landscape, and Rose is in your peripheral, hooded face white with shock, and she knows, she’s been there, but nothing she can say will bring you down.

It was unnecessary. This death. There was no reason for Karkat to die. No reason for any more death. You’d promised nobody else would die.

You don’t know where Gamzee is, but you knew. You’d sent Karkat’s goodbye to Rose, and she’d found an explanation, had told you what had happened, and you’d feared for his life, you begged and pleaded with the masters of the game that Karkat would live, that you’d get to meet him.

You did.

You met him and you fell a little bit more in love with him than you had been. You hadn’t known, of course. But you look into English’s face, meet his grin with one of your own, and you know he knows. You know that you won’t walk away.

Karkat is cold in your arms, his normally cool skin damp with blood, his clothes stiff and body beginning to lock with rigor mortis, not enough to make him impossible to carry, but enough that you have to force yourself to curl his spine and bring his knees up so you can carry him.

His hair smells of ash. Of blood. Of Death.

His skin tastes of iron and of candy, of stone and ectobiology.

You wonder if you could bring him back. Jade could take you back far enough that you wouldn’t bump into him in the labs, and you could recreate him by snatching him from his time. You dismiss the thought as quickly as it arrived.

This is a doomed timeline, you realise.

He wasn’t meant to die.

 _Nobody_ was meant to die.

He’s so. He’s small. He’s tiny. You’d always pictured him lanky like yourself, all elbows and with a round face.

But he’s not. He’s lanky, sure, but he’s been working for too long now at making himself fit enough to avoid the Culling, and it shows. He weighs more than you, you can feel your shoulders pulling even as you push yourself from the checkerboard, back out of English’s reach.

You wonder why he didn’t stop you from retrieving the body. You wonder why he’s allowing you this.

You know he means to kill you. He means to kill all of you. It’s what is meant to happen. This whole thing, the games. The sessions.

They’re meant to bring him here, to destroy everybody’s universe. Because it’s fun for him.

But you resisted; all of you. You stopped him. Somehow, the trolls reset, started again. Fucked it up. Fucked your universe up, and you fucked it over yourselves, determined to reset the thing and start again, fix the mistakes.

It was a doomed timeline from the beginning.

There’s no way to beat him. Jade could manipulate time and space all she liked, Lord English could do just the same. Dave could flashstep back and forth like his Bro, like the hero he’s meant to be, but it wouldn’t do any good. Rose had Seen, knew that there were loopholes they could exploit, that there were discrepancies in the code of the universe, the Cancer in the Genesis Frog.

It was _possible_.

But for all they had time and space shenanigans, they’d lost Vriska’s luck. They’d already _lost a God-Tier_. They could die. Had died. All of them. They were made of death; the only thing they could become was death.

Dead. Everybody was going to die.

You laugh. You can hear yourself, but you don’t remember ever making the noise. You can hear it echoing, cracking and shaking with tears you can’t – won’t – shed. You can feel Karkat’s blood – so _human_ – soaking through your clothes. You can see the stain it makes on the checkerboard even from here.

You kind of, just a little, wish that you had Gamzee here. Insane, yes, dangerous, certainly, but you wouldn’t mind throwing him at English, just to see what kind of damage he’d do. You never know, you suppose. He might _be_ one of the Messiahs he’d been preaching about. He might be the product of his own ravings. He might be a God.

Fuck if he can ascend to God Tier in this state, you think. Bard of Rage, Karkat had said. He was the Bard of Rage, and he would kill everybody.

You wonder if he’s still alive. How he’d take Karkat’s death if he knew. Wonder if he cares enough – is lucid enough to care – no, not lucid, that’s the problem – a sober Gamzee, you’d come to learn, was the most dangerous one – but sobriety brought with it apathy for the paler quadrants. All he felt was rage, and you wonder, you really hope, that the moiraillegiance between Karkat and Gamzee had been strong enough to break through that.

Nepeta had, apparently, tried to kill Gamzee for killing Equius. You almost hope that Karkat’s death would have the same effect.

Theories, theories. It’s all what-ifs and stream-of-consciousness. _It doesn’t matter_.

Nobody had time to look for Gamzee, anyway. Nobody knows if he survived the labs exploding. You almost hope not, though having a psychopath on your side – on Karkat’s side, at least – would be a fucking Godsend.

No pun intended. This wasn’t the time for jokes.

Jade touches your arm, her hair billowing about her from the force of the Windy Thing. You really should get that under control, but you can’t bring yourself to care. That’s the problem. The only thing that matters is that Karkat’s dead.

For.

No.

Reason.

“John?” she asks, and there is concern from behind her glasses.

You hate her. You hate her and her smiles and her sympathy and her tears. You hate her big glasses and her buck teeth and you hate how she has Dave wrapped around her finger. You hate how she is so much more powerful than you are. You hate everything about her. But you love her too. She’s your sister, through Shenanigans. She’s _family_. And family is _everything_.

You take a breath. Not a Breath. Just a breath. You force yourself to _breathe_ , pushing air into your lungs because you need to breathe to be able to ask her a question.

“Can you put him somewhere?” you whisper, your nose between his horns, voice low and choked. His hair is oddly brittle. You’d have thought it would be softer. “Where he’ll be safe. So English can’t – so he doesn’t – I want him to be happy.”

Jade hugs you tight from behind – the only place she can, what with you holding Karkat so tightly – and buries her face in your neck. Her glasses did into the bone of your jaw hinge. She nods a little, and your neck feels a little wet. Her hands slide along your arms to touch your hands, lace your fingers together, both of you holding onto Karkat.

“I cared a lot about him too,” she says, and you know she did. She might have been annoyed with him at first, disliked him, even, but so did you.

And then he’s gone and you feel empty, and Jade’s pulling you out of the way, throwing you across the empty space and telling you to protect the trolls, and you hate that she and Rose and Dave are the warriors, but she has a point. Someone has to keep an eye on the trolls. Aradia and Sollux can only do so much.

You think Jade knows you’re in no fit state to fight, as much as you want to. You can’t, you’re incapable, every muscle in your body has seized. She knows it, and so do the others. English has hit you where it hurts the most, and he _knows_.

 **== >**

Later, much later. So long later that you feel a hundred years old. Not even a day has passed. Karkat refuses to explain why he did it.

You’re both so much older now. You didn’t think he was going to grow up. But Jade did her thing. You’re all together now, and it’s not good, it’s not perfect, it’s not even okay, it’s – it’s shithive maggots – but it’s the only thing you’ve got, and you cling to it with every broken breath because this is the only chance you’ll get, you think. This is the last of the dream bubbles.

This is the life you could have lived.

Everybody’s there.

Dave and Rose and Jade, on the peripheral, the last men standing. Feferi and Eridan, Vriska and Tavros, Equius and Nepeta, they’re all there, aware and knowing, and the others dip in and out as they live their own last moments. You do it too. Sometimes you’re with the dead, sometimes you’re with the dying. Sometimes you can see the universe exploding, sometimes all you see is Karkat’s bright eyes and sharp teeth.

He doesn’t say why he died. Doesn’t say why he seemed to think he could do something. You don’t mind. You hold on tight and you tell him you’re never letting go.

He laughs at you, but he holds you back, his claws digging into your skin through your clothes. You’re taller than him, a lot taller, you’ve got five inches on him at least. Maybe even six. It’s hard to tell, wrapped up in each other as you are. His feet don’t touch the floor, yours go through it.

You love him so much you can’t breathe. You’re choking on your blood as you bleed out, and you think you can see Jade tearing a hole straight through English, with Dave following it, twisting the knife, as it were.

But what it does to the demon, you don’t know. Don’t care to know. All that matters is that Karkat’s here, he’s safe, he’s alive. No.

No. He’s not alive. He’s dead. You’re dying too, and you both know it. English killed you. English is killing everyone. Terezi’s dead. Sollux is dead. Kanaya’s bleeding out. Rose is bleeding out. Aradia is pulling through by the skin of her teeth because of Shenanigans. She’s trying to save you. But she can’t, you know she can’t.

You won’t let her.

They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die. But. You remember every second of this life Jade’s given you in your dream bubble, you remember every second of growing up alongside the trolls, in this facsimile of a real world. You’re all dead, and you all know it, but still you grow, still you learn and still you _live_. There is nothing else to say about it.

You tangle yourself tighter into Karkat’s pliant body, grip him tighter, moulding yourself to him. His heel jams in the back of your knee, makes you laugh, and his grin is sharp against your ear.

He whispers in Alternian, hums and clicks and throaty noises of acquiescence and you don’t need a translator to know what he’s said.

Just to piss him off, you reply in Portuguese, an _Eu te amo_ thrown into the space between you.

Predictably, he bites, but he long since learnt the amount of force he can use before you bleed, and the bite barely scrapes.

“I’m happy,” you say, because you’re a predictable, unironic shit.

He hums.

“I’m dying.”

“I know,” he says, and holds you tighter, as if it were even possible.

“I don’t know how long Jade can keep this bubble going,” you add.

“I _know_ ,” he repeats, and tenses, body suddenly cold, solid, immovable.

You know he’s upset; you’ve talked about it before. At the beginning, when you first hit the checkerboard hard enough to shatter your spine, blood already spreading beneath you, torn to shreds by the loopholes you couldn’t exploit. Since you first told him, you haven’t said a word about it, just gone about your business.

Terezi stops by to check on you. She knows you know why she’s doing it. You pretend you don’t care.

She tells you that Dave’s dead, Alpha Dave, he’s been blown to smithereens.

You can’t feel Karkat next to you, and he’s as stiff as you, as frozen and shattered.

“Oh,” you say, because what else do you say? You want to see him. But you don’t want to leave Karkat. You don’t want to die without him _there_. You can’t bear to be alone when you know he was, because he died too quick for you to get there.

“He’s in the next bubble over,” she says, reading your thoughts on your face, and leaves.

For a long, horrible minute, you lie in silence.

“You’d better go see him,” Karkat says. “Whilst he’s still here.”

“But.”

“Fuckass,” he says, and it’s been so long since he called you that, preferring _sweetheart_ or _darling_ or some names in Alternian you still don’t know but can tell are endearments, or more blasé and uninspired, _John_. You want to laugh, but can’t. “Go. I’ll still be here when you get back, you’re too stubborn to die without me, I know you. I’ve been with you all your life. That won’t change. Now, _go_.”

Rose is there, holding Dave so tight neither of them can breathe. Dave might be crying. It’s hard to tell.

“Dave,” you say, the name choking you like Dad’s tie. “Rose.” The name is barely a whisper, a gasp of breath.

They’re both older now, old enough that if you hadn’t known them for so long (it’s barely been a day, it’s only been hours since the first time you met them, but you’ve known them all your life) you wouldn’t have recognised them. They have Bro’s eyes and Mom’s jaw, and Rose has the tiny waist of her Mom and her red, red mouth whilst Dave has his Bro’s shoulders and crooked smile.

It’s such a tight hug when you get to them that you wonder if you might seize like that and not ever be able to let go.

Jade is the last one standing. You don’t know how to feel about that.

Both Dave and Rose move on quickly – to you, anyway, it’s much too soon, and you’re begging them not to go, but they slip through your fingers and you’re staring, once more, at English’s laughing face. Jade’s blood is splattered across the checkerboard, and across English’s face, but it seems superficial at best. The next time you see her, she’s hazy in front of you, dead but refusing to die, and her own dream bubble isn’t sure what to do with her.

You die for real not long after Dave and Rose, you try to hold on for Jade, so she’s not alone when she gets here, but you know that when she dies, this life, this bubble, it’ll end, you’ll cease to be. English will obliterate the universe and everything in it. Even you. Especially you.

For all that you try to hold on, it’s like forcing yourself to stay awake. You bleed harder, the last of your life slipping through the cracks in the checkerboard and your body’s falling through space and time, and Karkat holds on tight, a hushing noise between your eyes, his breath warm and candy-sweet, mouth black and cheeks red.

You cry when it happens. You wish you could say you didn’t. You wish you were braver, but you’re dead for real, and that’s never happened before. Oh, sure, you died to ascend to God Tier, but that’s nothing. Vriska assured you that it would be okay, that you’d go to sleep and wake up a God. There’s no assurance this time, and you can see it in her face when she stops by on her way through to pester Tavros, who is in turn pestering Dave in the whatever-space Dave has chosen to inhabit. She knows you’re dead for real this time, and knows that there’s no chance of survival through loopholes.

Karkat holds you tight as you sob, humming a tune that had become yours so many years ago. And then that fades and you are left with nothing but the empty, silent nothingness.

 **== >**

Your name is John Egbert, and today is your thirteenth birthday. You’ve been avoiding your Dad all morning, because you know he’s going to try and hit you with a cake. You check your messages on Pesterchum, and _turntechGodhead_ is pestering you about a present. So is _tentacleTherapist_ and _gardenGnostic_. You wonder what’s so special about the presents they sent you – of course they’re important, but Rose is being especially pester-y this morning, and Jade’s being all mysterious. Dave’s just as impatient as always, telling you to get your grove on, he can’t wait around forever.

He’s in Texas. He can wait.

You’re about to turn from your computer and go check the mail when pesterchum pings.

It says that _carcinoGeneticist_ is offline – you’re pretty sure you blocked the troll months ago, after his use of ‘fuckass’ nearly got your computer taken off you. But it hasn’t stopped him leaving you a message.

 _SO I HAD A DREAM IN MY RECUPARACOON, AND I BET YOU WON’T READ THIS, BUT I DON’T GIVE A FUCK, IT NEEDS TO BE SAID. AND IT WAS A FUCKING AWFUL DREAM, AND I DON’T WANT TO GET INTO SPECIFICS. BUT KNOW THIS, FUCKASS._

 _WHATEVER THAT DREAM WAS, IT WAS REAL. ALL OF IT. EVERY LAST THOUGHT AND MOMENT._

 _HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHN EGBERT. APPARENTLY, I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU._

++END++

**Author's Note:**

> I actually wrote this before the Act 6 intermission, but I can't remember if I wrote it before or after [S]: Cascade.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
